


Wizard’s Chess: A Great Idea

by thatsrightdollface



Series: Danganronpa, Except at Hogwarts - Crossover Stories [1]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Gambling, Hogwarts, I'm Sorry, Kokichi thinks he made a mistake, M/M, feelings of belonging, this is just for fun!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 09:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14329074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: In retrospect, Kokichi Oma probably shouldn’t have let Slytherin House’s infamous Queen of Gambling coax him into a game of winner-take-all wizard’s chess, but there ya go.  Sometimes he just found himself in messes like this one!





	Wizard’s Chess: A Great Idea

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!! :D I hope you enjoy this story if you read it... I have no good excuse. 0_0
> 
> Warning: I sorted Kokichi into Gryffindor, here! I think he could fit a LOT of Hogwarts Houses, in some kinda AU... But for this thing, I cast him there 'cause of how bravely and without hesitation he sacrifices himself to try and end the killing game. :) And how he has that code of honor (no killing)... And how I think a lot of Gryffindor House wouldn't understand him... Sort of mirroring the way he's misunderstood in canon???? Idek. It's just for fun... I mean no harm. 
> 
> Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful day!!

In retrospect, Kokichi Oma probably shouldn’t have let Slytherin House’s infamous Queen of Gambling coax him into a game of winner-take-all wizard’s chess, but there ya go.  Sometimes he just _found himself_ in messes like this one!  And if anybody was going around saying Kokichi may have goaded the Snake House Gambling Queen (queen of lace and fake accents, too, though that was all a little less relevant) into the game to start with…  Or that maybe it was his teasing that’d gotten her gambling not only House points but also unlimited access to either of their respective common rooms for an entire incredibly awkward month…  Welp.  Kokichi didn’t know what to tell you, really!  You probably shouldn’t be listening to liars like that.

What really mattered was, Kokichi was currently championing his House in a battle he didn’t think he could win, anymore.  If he’d put the Sorting Hat on right about then, the legendary Sword of Gryffindor would almost definitely have come clattering to his aid, ready to hack the chess board up into tiny apologetic slices of marble.  _That’s_ how dire things were looking.  And normally, Kokichi wouldn’t have minded too bad.  He lost games all the time, or tied them over and over in a row trying to make certain shy, detective novel-reading Ravenclaw boys laugh.

The difference now probably had something to do with how the people in charge had actually agreed to let Celestia Ludenberg go through with their deal, if her ridiculous gambling abilities won her the victory she seemed sure they would…  Heh, and Kokichi had counted on them putting a foot down or _something_.  So much for school authority.

Of course, the difference might’ve _also_ had something to do with the way Kaito Momota and a few other Gryffindors were providing a furious running commentary of the game just over Kokichi’s shoulder, too.  There had even been talk from a couple jerks Kokichi didn’t really know about “punishment.”  About seeing whether they could get Kokichi suspended from the Quidditch team or something if they truly _did_ have to give up their common room to another House for that long.  Vindictive!  Really, super vindictive!  Kaito kept going on about how he already knew Byakuya Togami had a fancier telescope than him, so he didn’t need to hear him using his aristocrat’s old blood-magic to read stock markets in the stars or whatever while he was trying to study.  Akane Owari was mostly worried the Slytherin class might eat all their snacks, but Akane was usually worried about stuff like that.

(And it wasn’t like she even had to _think_ about snacks in this situation, anyway, Kokichi had huffed a couple times already.  Kirumi Tojo was still everyone’s favorite Slytherin House mom, wasn’t she?  She’d make sure everyone had enough snacks.  Geez!

Kirumi had nodded at that, actually, a tiny smile passing over her face like a shadow hurrying home to its den.  At least _someone_ had Kokichi’s back, sort of.)

The game had started out pretty quiet, with a table magicked into “neutral” territory in the middle of the Great Hall while not too many people were around.  They’d been chess-dueling for a stupid amount of time now, though.  Students from every House had gathered close around them, murmuring commentary and hissing insults and occasionally wondering aloud how Gryffindor was ever gonna make up so many House points.  Not everybody shared Kokichi’s, _“Let’s have fun on the journey, okay?  Let’s raise a little hell!”-_ ish approach to that kind of thing, did they?  Hah.  Wonderful.

Above them all, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’s famous fancy-pants sky-ceiling churned purple and bleeding red with a coming storm; Kokichi kept shooing those nosy hovering candles out of his face and telling them he needed to concentrate.  Celestia – O Merciless Empress of the Card Table – smoothed her elaborate black lace skirts, her smile just as pretty and empty as a china doll’s.  Her eyes were slick and laughing red; there were plucked dragon’s scales and ribbons strung daintily in her hair.  Not exactly her uniform, which was points already, and Kokichi was almost jealous of all those crackling scales, full of cold fire and molten gold and hoards buried under places no one would ever think to look. 

Far away throughout the castle, Hogwarts life whirred on as normal.  Gonta Gokuhara from Hufflepuff House was probably out tending to his new herd of many-headed hydra-centipedes, with their twitching, shivery legs and affectionate nicknames.  Ravenclaw’s wannabe ladies’ man, Kazuichi Souda, was probably putting the finishing touches on whatever weird contraption he’d been designing to try and convince the headmaster that blending magic and Muggle tech wasn’t such a pointless idea as most people said.  Ghosts dripped through the castle’s damp, mossy dungeon walls as if through a light rain; portraits reenacted the souls smeared into their paint, and staircases creaked around from one tangled spiderweb-maze into another. 

Kokichi heard a little flustered, disbelieving laughter from farther into the school, speaking of those passageways, which probably meant Slytherin House’s Nagito Komaeda had gotten trapped on a stubborn staircase to nowhere again.  Sometimes it seemed like the whole castle was taunting that guy – he seriously had the worst luck.  Well, except that Hajime Hinata dropped his silvery-green striped scarf hurrying off to see if Nagito could be rescued, or if maybe they needed to throw him a couple blankets for the night again…  So at least Nagito wasn’t in it all by himself.  That could’ve been way worse luck, Kokichi figured, even if Hajime ended up getting lost searching the castle for him like last time.

Kokichi sent his knight to take out Celestia’s bishop – he brushed a hand through his flippy grape-soda hair and sneered far more confidently than he’d thought he could manage right about then.  It wasn’t the _worst_ move he could’ve made, right?  The tiny gleaming stone horse trotted forward, flicking a tail that moved far too smoothly – as if stone could turn to liquid and back again if only it wanted to badly enough.

Celestia took that knight pretty soon, though, and offered Kokichi one of her sweetest scheming smiles.  She reminded him that the loss would still stand if he slipped into the infamous Animagus form he kept bragging about and tried to dash away.  Kokichi said he knew…  Not that he hadn’t daydreamed about it, of course.  His Animagus form was pretty amazing.  Everyone in his gang back home had thought so. 

D.I.C.E., Kokichi’s gang was called.  He missed them all the time, though kind of especially when the same people that cheered for him after Quidditch games could earnestly throw around ideas like kicking him off the team just because they felt like it.  It had taken Kokichi a while to think maybe he could belong here at all, surrounded by Hogwarts-types, people with family trees and boobytrapped Gringotts vaults and no idea how to pick locks without magic.  And now, look.  If anyone had asked why Kokichi looked so pissed off right then, he probably would’ve just snapped something about House points or wanting to steal Celestia’s dragon scale hair ornament thingy.

It was around then that the cute Ravenclaw boy showed up – around when Kokichi lost the knight.  Shuichi Saihara been studying late or something.  He was pretty damn amazing in enough of their classes that Kokichi wouldn’t have put it past him…  Especially Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts – Shuichi knew more about poisons than pretty much anyone else Kokichi knew.  And D.I.C.E. had operated out of Knockturn Alley for a little while there, so you _know_ he had some idea what he was talking about!  People said Shuichi had a poison collection hidden way up in Ravenclaw Tower, and Kokichi really wanted to believe that was true.

The first thing Kokichi thought seeing Shuichi there - chatting with his best friend Kaede Akamatsu and carrying an enormous stack of Restricted Section books he’d probably gotten signed professor-y recommendation letters to check out – was that it looked like the Shuichi and Kaede Duo had been on their way somewhere fast.  But Shuichi'd gotten them to stop and watch the game, anyway.  That probably would’ve meant something good, especially if Kokichi’d been winning!

His second thought, of course, was that now Shuichi was almost definitely gonna see him get A.) Crushed at wizard’s chess, B.) Possibly suspended from the Quidditch team? and C.) Yelled at by Akane for a while about snacks.  _Wow, Kokichi,_ he told himself.  _Just…  Wow._

And then, as he was watching Celestia move her queen forward, just as elegantly as any girl who wanted to come off all hollow and porcelain could want to be, Kokichi felt something rustling in the pocket of his checkered hoodie.  You know, the one underneath his robes.  He would’ve just ignored it if he’d expected to have any paper inside his pockets, but that day he knew he only had some fireworks from the Weasley Twins’ notorious joke shop.  (Don’t ask what those were for.  You probably wouldn’t want to know, Kokichi might say.)  Those things had been known to set his essay parchments on fire every now and then, which was why they couldn’t live in his backpack anymore…  So.  Hm.

Kokichi held up a _“Just a Sec”_ kind of finger and fished the paper out of his pocket.  As smoothly as he could, what with all the fireworks. 

It was a note, short and crumpled and in Shuichi Saihara’s crisp, nearly grown-up handwriting.  At first it looked like a bunch of gibberish, but as Kokichi studied the note it took on a little more form:

_“Kaede told me about your bet.  I hope your housemates go a little easier on you – I’d miss watching you play Quidditch.  You always seem to find some way of mixing up the game.”_

__“It’s just squiggles,” Kaito announced, reading over Kokichi’s shoulder.  “Though I dunno what else I was really expecting from _this_ guy.”

Kokichi thought back over his daredevil flips and smarmy Quidditch-playing habits…  There were plenty of reasons other Seekers threatened him with curses after games, true.  Very true, though of course it wasn’t like Kokichi would’ve expected _Shuichi_ to say something untrue to him – to say something without meaning it.  Which had to mean… Shuichi who knew all these hilarious Muggle mystery authors, Shuichi who got permission slips before liberating Restricted Section library books, Shuichi with the poison stash under his bed…  _Shuichi_ had been watching him play.  Cheering him on, no matter what kinds of angry shit his Ravenclaw housemate Miu was crowing out next to him.  Shuichi knew how Kokichi liked to put on a show; maybe Shuichi was even expecting some sort of trick out of him right that very second!

And it wasn’t like Kokichi was gonna go down without a little more fight, _that_ in mind.  It wasn’t like he completely didn’t belong in that castle, either, despite how weird things got in the Gryffindor common room sometimes, despite all the staircases acting like assholes.  It’d be nice to have some good news to write home to D.I.C.E, too.  Maybe he’d even use a Howler, so they’d expect the worst before it burst open and started cackling at them?

Maybe he had some more tricks up his sleeves, and his poor not-yet-shattered chess people might stop looking at him like he’d just broken all their tiny stone hearts.  Which, you know…  They _were_ just about to get shattered.  Tough game. 

Now, what did Kokichi know about Celestia Ludenberg?  Not much, except that she had the fanciest clothes and a set of creepy earrings made out of frozen pixie wings.  She took card games way too seriously, also, to the point where Kokichi wondered if any part besides winning was even fun anymore. 

Oh, yeah, and she loved money.  Like, _loved_ money.  That was where all the spooky, morally-questionable jewelry came from, after all. 

Kokichi thought maybe he could mix up the game here, alright.  He prided himself on keeping the audience on its toes!  And…  And you know, he’d never actually meant to gamble away stuff that didn’t belong to him.  Not… Really.  And it could’ve been Shuichi’d realized that, right?  It could’ve been he’d read the guilt in Kokichi’s face, the way not even his D.I.C.E. friends back home could do every single time.

(Or maybe Kokichi would’ve been able to convince Shuichi that he just did this next thing ‘cause he’d really miss playing Quidditch, or because he didn’t want a super-crowded common room, either?  Didn’t matter yet, really.)

It was possible Kokichi just wanted Shuichi to smile all proudly at him.  To think he was selfless, only for a second.  If anyone at Hogwarts could think something like that about him, maybe it was Shuichi Saihara.

Kokichi waited just a few minutes to test out his new plan – long enough for Kaede to set her hulking pile of books down at her feet, rubbing at her arms where they’d gone all tingly, and for Kaito to stop peeking at that mysterious squiggle-note Shuichi hadn’t meant for him to read.  And then he grinned very widely, as fearlessly as he could, and asked how much money Celestia had ever made gambling on wizard’s chess.

The answer was a lot.  More than Kokichi’d been expecting, honestly, though his gang D.I.C.E. had seen more every now and then before they let it slip away somehow and kept on with the chase.  With the frenzy and play of it all.  Celestia looked so smug talking about that cash, too, like an actual dragon preening her long gold-plated claws. 

Nobody was expecting Kokichi to declare, “Okay, Miss Ludenberg, then what if I promised to double those coins?  All other bets are off the table.  Just…  I’ll get you a big old pile of gold by the time we graduate.  Deal?”

“By the time we graduate?” Celestia asked, very innocent.  Fluttering a hand up over her lips.  “How about by the Yule Ball?  Next year, maybe?”

Kokichi gritted his teeth, forcing that big, eager smile to stick around.  “Yule Ball?  No sweat,” he said, and yeah – probably no one was expecting _that_ in the whole castle, either, except maybe Shuichi Saihara.  Kokichi met those serious grey-gold eyes of his and winked, though he didn’t keep watching long enough to see how Shuichi responded.  He hoped nobody noticed any kind of flush slithering up his cheeks, anyway.    

 By the time Kokichi finished assuring Kirumi Tojo – everyone’s Slytherin Mom, it couldn’t be denied – that he _definitely wasn’t_ gonna sell vials of his soul to the Kuzuryu yakuza family or anything dumb to pay off this shiny new debt, the note Shuichi Saihara’d passed him had changed.  Kokichi only noticed ‘cause he’d been tucking the little page off far away from his firework collection for safekeeping – Kokichi noticed, and he murmured, “Oh hey,” to himself in a little, honest voice no one but his own self (and maybe the Hogwarts ghosts) could’ve ever hoped to hear.  It looked as though the note had been written and erased a couple times, now.  Shuichi _had_ always been sort of shy.

 _“That wasn’t the direction I expected the game to go, honestly…  I’m impressed, Kokichi,”_ the note said, now.  _“And you know, I have a job at a potions shop on the weekends.  It doesn’t pay much, but do you think it would help you out to work there with me?  I could vouch for you.  Don’t feel pressured to write back.”_

 __But of course, _of course_ Kokichi was gonna write back.  His original plan had been to present Celestia with a giant pile of chocolate coins – (note he’d said “coins” and not “Galleons,” or anything.  Pretty crafty, huh?) – but getting a job alongside Shuichi Saihara sounded damn good, too.  


End file.
